Aug 12, 2010

ATTENTION ANGLICAN AFRICAN BISHOPS CONFERENCE--How is the Anglican Church in Africa ¨spearheading and participating in global initiatives that seek to address the threats to human dignity?*

¨Friday afternoon and children in different uniforms are streaming out of schools, flooding the streets of phase 6, Tshepisong Township, West of Johannesburg. Vendors are actively selling snacks to passersby while some neighbours share the latest gossip in street corners.

Finally parking outside the home of Nomlindelo Nomthanti (24), known by her peers as Tarras, laughter rips through the house, welcoming us, as a family of four, headed by a single parent, Tarras’s mother Philisiwe Nomthanti (41), share jokes and live life to the fullest despite the day to day challenges affecting township families, particularly those with homosexual children.

Tarass is a lesbian, out and proud and she is one of a few people who have been accepted by their families, fully loved and respected despite their sexual orientation, something very rare, especially from a black township family of staunch believers.

In a country rocked by homophobic acts ranging from parents disowning their own flesh and blood, hate speech, corrective rapes and murders due to sexual orientation, Tarras’s mother says she could not have asked for a better daughter.

Talking about how she discovered herself and how she came out Tarras says, “There was a girl that I was hopelessly attracted to at school, and I knew when I saw her that it was not a play mommy-baby kind of an attraction, I wanted her to be my girlfriend.”

Nomlindelo 'Tarras' Nomthanti

Coming out

She wrote a letter to the girl explaining her attraction “and at the end I signed ‘from your lesbian’ because I wanted her to know and understand.

Then one day when I had my friends visiting me at home I made sure that I shout out very loud so that my mother could hear, I said, guys when I get married, I am going to marry a girl”, Tarras revealed laughing.

Indeed the message went across because a few days later “I sat her down and asked her, ‘you earlier told me that you don’t want to wear dresses anymore and I bought you pants and gave away all your feminine clothes and now I hear that you want to marry a woman, what is going on?’ she told me, ‘mom, I have strong feelings for women and I have never had such feelings for men, I can not even imagine myself in a relationship with a man, I love women’”, Tarras’s mother said.

“Nonetheless I accepted her the way she is because if God has created her the way she is, who am I to try and change her?...¨please read on as there are many ¨Challenges¨ HERE

Bishops of the Anglican Communion from over 400 dioceses in Africa are expected together with the Archbishop of Canterbury. A one-week All African Bishops' Conference (AABC) will take place in Uganda from August 23 to 29. HERE

According to Edward Gaamuwa, the chairman of the organising committee, the council of Anglican provinces of Africa meeting in Pretoria, South Africa in 2001 resolved to hold an African Anglican Bishop Conference to focus on African needs.

"The Anglican Church is very old in Africa but African problems and issues are still being treated as an appendix to other issues at the church's international forum," Gaamuwa said in an interview.

Some of the aims for this conference include mobilising the bishops to tackle the obstacles that continue to keep the continent in conflict, poverty, corruption, poor leadership and disease.

There is also the need to create a platform for interaction and partnership development and also to expose church leaders to various models for resource mapping, investment, management and global technology.

And how the Anglican Church in Africa is spearheading and participating in global initiatives that seek to address the threats to human dignity...read it all HERE

The Anglican Church of the Province of Uganda will be hosting the second All African Bishops’ Conference from August 23- 29, 2010 in Kampala, Uganda. HERE

TAKE ACTION AGAINST BIGOTRY, IGNORANCE and OUTCASTING/SOCIAL ISOLATION and THE ABUSERS of FELLOW ANGLICANS/others at The Anglican Communion:

The ANGLICAN UN, United Nations, HUMAN RIGHTS Observer, Mrs Hellen Grace Wangusa from Uganda, has an office and staff provided by the Episcopal Church (USA) at the Church Center 815 Second Avenue, New York, 10017. The direct office line is (001) 212-716- 6263 and the email address unoffice@episcopalchurch.org

2 comments:

Yes, may she be safe and happy and FREE to be the person that God created her to be...I see the look of love and admiration her Mother has on her face for her daughter...a great sign of spiritual, emotional and physical good health at that house!

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REAL HERO/REAL LIFE: Bishop John Shelby Spong

“I was simply interpreting a rising consciousness,” he said. “Whether it was race or women or homosexual people, the issue was always the same: fighting against anything that dehumanizes a child of God on the basis of an external characteristic.” Bishop John Shelby Spong (click on his photo)

¨Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?¨ Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu